Perhaps you don’t know it, but the history of Twitter, far from being the typical boring story with investors and firms, has a morbidity that is more like the typical Hollywood narratives.
Unlike other Silicon Valley startups, Twitter’s success is due more to the collaboration of several subjects than to the revolutionary idea of just one visionary. At different times throughout their life journey, several people have provided ideas and also leadership that have made Twitter one of the most important social platforms. Of course, this group collaboration has been everything less ideal.
History of Twitter: This is how the idea germinated
The earliest history of Twitter begins in 2004 in the apartment of Noah Glassan American programmer who devised a project called Odeo: its basic idea was the possibility of leaving a recorded message in MP3 format when calling by phone, which was hosted in the Cloud. This project would later be joined by the creator of Blogger.com, Evan Williams. Shortly after, Odeo became a podcasting platform with 14 employees, including the CEO, Biz Stone – Williams’ former co-worker at Google-, and the designer Jack Dorsey.
At first, Williams was just an advisor and investor to Odeo, not a founder. He later acquired a more active role with the status of co-founder until finally becoming the CEO of the company. Unfortunately at that time, Apple launched iTunes and Odeo, without remedy, entrenched its fall to hell. Williams understood that he needed her to reinvent herself or modernize herself in some way to avoid failure.
Then Jack Dorsey came up with an idea to turn the company around. Specific: use SMS to create conversations among small groups of people. Glass and Dorsey soon began to work on this idea to present it to the company, they were enthusiastic. Although it is true that Williams and Stone were not at the same level of emotion.
and then noace Twitter, the social network of 140 characters
The social network born in 2006 as an internal Odeo service and this is where the Twitter story really begins. The project had several names (Twiiit, Twich, Stat.us), although Noah Glass finally chose ‘Twttr’, which imitated the trill of a bird. The name is due to the fact that at that time there was a general tendency for startups – it persists today – to drop the vowels in their name (Flickr, Tumblr, Scribd…). The first tweet in the history of the platform was written by Jack Dorsey on March 21 of that same year and said “Just setting up my twttr” (only adjusting my Twttr).
It must be said that the limit of 140 characters in tweets that has characterized Twitter so much until very recently it was never for creative reasons. Rather they had to put it because they had no choice. Being a platform based on SMS, 140 spaces was the standard limit that mobile phone operators established in the SMS protocol.
Twitter story: Noah Glass’s “bad luck”
In October 2006, it is not known very well whether because they knew (secretly) of the potential of the platform or because they did not want to upset investors in the face of possible future failures, they bought twitter shares and created Obvious Corporation.
With this change, Jack Dorsey went from designer to take over as the first CEO, Biz Stone as Creative Director, and Evan Williams as President. Noah Glass was not so lucky because it took less than a little time for Williams to fire him. It’s not entirely clear why, although it is said that Williams and Glass’s personalities were very different and clashed too much. In either case, Williams remained at the helm of the company while Glass’s name, to his dismay, was (intentionally) deleted from Twitter history.
Twitter triumphs, Jack Dorsey is expelled
In 2007 is when Twitter officially becomes an independent company and Jack Dorsey becomes CEO. At that time they start increase users and traffic significantly, from 20,000 to 70,000 tweets per day. Also, in August of that same year, a user, Chris Messina, invents (by chance) the hashtagwhich would later be implemented on the platform.
Looking ahead to the gallery, things were going very well, but within the company the quarrels were becoming more and more evident between the founders. Until Williams, in another typical movie villain act, suggests expulsion of Jack Dorseya decision with which everyone in the company agreed.
With Williams as CEO, Twitter continued to grow and the number of users ended up bursting. suffice to say that the number of unique users increased by 1,300% in 2009 from 5 to 71 million users. An inordinate success. The problem was that the platform began to fall continuously.
The end of Evan Williams and the triumphant return of Jack Dorsey
As the platform kept crashing and the problem was not fixed, the criticism worsened. Williams had overseen this wild increase in users, but now I wasn’t good at making the right decisions. Both he and Biz Stone knew they needed to hire a large number of employees to get the job done. The truth is Twitter became a real chaosDespite having 145 million users, it did not generate much income.
Finally, faced with this unsustainable situation, the members of the board of Twitter decided to fire Evan Williams and bring back Jack Dorsey as CEO. Dick Costoloan entrepreneur and former comedian, replaced Williams as CEO until Jack Dorsey took over in 2015, where he remains today. Biz Stone ended up leaving the company in June 2011 due to the lack of support.
The history of Twitter, the social network that revolutionized the world of media
Since then, Twitter has shown that it is still in shape, according to data from the report carried out by We Are Social and Hootsuite, the famous platform has 436 million active users worldwide, after having registered a growth of more than 23%.
According to this study, Twitter is located in the seventh place in the ranking of user favoritesbeing the favorite of 3.3% of the user public.
On the other hand, despite the fact that it has always been in the shadow of Facebook, even today it is still influential and setting trends. There is no world event or news that is not commented on Twitter, in fact it covers more than one scenario live before any media.
The truth is that Twitter has been fighting for years to maintain its status as a reference social network, incorporating functionalities that please the most veteran users and that engage the new ones. Include multiple photos or gifs in tweets, the option to do surveys, the elimination of the character limit for private messages or the extension of the pretend bring the social network closer to its audience.
However, not all the changes on Twitter in recent years have pleased everyone. One of the most notorious was the change in your timeline, in which the tweets would appear in order of relevance instead of in chronological order. This did not like Twitter fans very much, who would soon begin to Trending Topic the hashtag #RIPTwitter.
Twitter works, and we continue to watch television connected through hashtags. In fact, many personalities from the world of politics, sports or culture use the platform as another means of communication. Even a company, person or can lose your good reputation . Although other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram have a greater number of users, how viral a comment will be on Twitter still has no direct competition. Twitter is and has been a revolution of the Internet and of communication.
The appearance on the scene of Elon Musk
Of course, a story as intense as this could not be without new script twists, and the latest addition to the scene is none other than the richest man in the world, . At the beginning of April 2022, Musk took over 9.2% of the total shares of the social network, thus becoming the majority shareholder of the company. The magnitude of this news put it in the spotlight of all the world’s media and set the internet on fire, in addition to causing Shares of the social network soared 25% in premarket trading.
Shortly after, on April 14, Musk would make his second move stating his intention to buy the platform. One of the main motives behind Musk’s moves was his desire to end the path of censorship that the social network was taking, since, as he stated in his letter to shareholders, “he believes in its potential to be the platform for freedom of expression around the world.
Later, on April 25, Twitter announced that it accepted the purchase offer for US$44 billion (just over 41,000 million euros) made by Elon Musk. However, the happiness was short-lived in Twitter village, since the tycoon would leave everyone speechless a couple of weeks later with this tweet:
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Namely, “Twitter deal temporarily suspended pending details supporting estimate that fake/spam accounts account for less than 5% of users.”
The consequences were immediate and the valuation of the social network on the stock exchange suffered a 20% drop, before the opening of the New York stock market. A few hours later, seeing the mess he had gotten himself into and the stock market cataclysm that in theory, in short, it was going to be his company, Musk tried to patch up the gigantic gap he had just created by posting a terse, (“still committed to purchase”).
The curtain falls: Musk concludes a work without a happy ending
Finally, on a fateful July 8, 2022, Twitter from Elon Musk’s lawyers. Through this, the termination of the merger agreement was announced and the social network was accused of violating said agreement as well as having made false and misleading representations with which Musk would have been deceived.
A termination of nothing more and nothing less than $44 billion and to which, Twitter, has reacted through, of course, a tweet. In it, Twitter’s board chairman, Bret Taylor, said the company is still committed to closing the deal at the agreed price and plans to take legal action to enforce the deal.
So it seems that this disagreeable relationship that promised so much will end up in court. For now, the drama closes its first act, we will have to wait to see what will happen in the second.
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